Phil Cooke, RightStar’s VP Federal, and I attended BMC’s Partner Summit held last week prior to BMC’s worldwide sales kickoff. It was a very positive couple of days, not only because RightStar won the BMC Public Sector Partner of the Year award for BMC’s FY11, but because the pendulum is starting to swing back towards more channel involvement.  Hard to believe, but the good news takeaway is that develop and execute a winning indirect strategy is #4 on BMC’s FY12 ESM priorities.

Fortunately for all of us, BMC continues to perform very, very well. Bob Beauchamp, BMC’s President and CEO, reported that ESM revenue (the Service Support, Assurance, and Automation product lines) is up 23% percent from the previous year. He also said that the BMC stock is at an all-time high and BMC is doing more SaaS business now than ServiceNow. Here’s what else I learned as it applies to RightStar:

Service Desk Express is going strong. I asked Paul Avenant, Sr. VP of ESM products about what BMC’s plans are for Service Desk Express and he reported that a new SDE version is in the works.  Further, BMC’s positioning in the mid-market space will be well supported with the new Corporate Account Manager (CAM) program.  The CAMs are aligning with partners and to sell all products primarily into that market segment.

BMC’s Saas offerings are hot. Rohit Gupta, who runs BMC Service Support and SaaS, described the success BMC has had with Remedy OnDemand (RoD) and RemedyForce. He said that BMC picked up about 20 new RoD customers at the end of the quarter. What’s especially exciting for RightStar (and other partners) is that the onboarding will be subcontracted exclusively through the channel.

There is a heightened interest in Service Automation/Assurance and Cloud Management. Scott Fulton, who runs BMC’s Cloud, Datacenter and Proactive Operations was especially excited about BMC’s progress in Cloud Management. He explained that BMC has 40 recent Cloud Lifecycle Management (CLM) wins and 350+ CLM opportunities. Scott said that this is the killer application for public and private cloud service providers, as it allows for automatic provisioning, self-service portals, and flexible metering and billing offerings.

Regarding BMC Proactive Operations, Scott presented the Gartner Magic Quadrant showing four years of steady improvement.  This combined with 300+ new customers in FY11 make ProactiveNet a more compelling solution than ever before.  Likewise, BMC has made good progress with its BladeLogic data center automation product with more than 200+ wins during the past year.

Based on the many presentations and discussions that took place at the Summit, I can say with confidence that this is a good time to be a BMC Elite Solution Partner!